She later dropped by Tumblr’s Gramercy Park offices in New York, where Mr. Tong introduced her to Jamie Beck, a fashion photographer with her own Tumblr blog, fromme-toyou.tumblr.com. The two set up a photo shoot. Mr. Tong asked Oscar de la Renta, one of the first luxury fashion brands to have a Tumblr, OscarPRGirl.tumblr.com, to provide the gowns.
The resulting photographs, animated images that Ms. Beck calls “cinemagraphs,” featured an elegant Ms. Rocha in her New York apartment flicking her kohl-lined eyes or letting a balcony breeze tousle her hair. They were posted on Ms. Rocha’s blog, oh-so-coco.tumblr.com, reblogged or “liked” about 40,000 times, and viewed countless times by fashion fans around the world.
“For the most part, it’s great having things online,” Ms. Beck, 28, said of the high-fashion shoots she posts using Tumblr. “It can be shared. Ninety percent of my work isn’t a super masterpiece, but if I can reach people who can appreciate it, then it’s successful.”
Tumblr, founded four years ago, has reached out to the fashion community in a way no other social networking site has. For the second time, it has brought users to New York Fashion Week as reporters, paying for their trips and giving them access to the shows. Their coverage is being posted on a dedicated channel, tumblr.com/NYFW, made up of posts from 20 bloggers picked by Tumblr’s staff, along with contributions from magazines that have their own Tumblrs, like Vogue, GQ, T Magazine and Glamour.
Formerly a pileup of profanity-laced teenage ramblings and partly expressed emotions, at least to an outsider’s eye, Tumblr has become an image-driven platform of importance to fashion photographers — like Terry Richardson (who uses it mostly as a diary) — brands and bloggers, who have made it an integral part of their online lives.
Tumblr hired Mr. Tong, who had previously founded Weardrobe.com, a community for those who chronicle their outfits online, as fashion director in December 2009, the first full-time position of its kind in the social networking sphere.
“When Tumblr took a look at the thousand blogs with the biggest followings on the platform, it found that 18 percent of them were fashion-related,” Mr. Tong said in a recent interview in Tumblr’s office. “My role exists because of what they wanted their competitive edge to be. Facebook and Twitter are generalist communities. They’re not trying to support the creative community. We thought, ‘What can we do to support this community?’ That’s where they saw the light.”
The traffic that came to the first tumblr.com/NYFW page in February “wasn’t as large as we’d hoped,” Mr. Tong said, due in part, he thinks, to lags in the site’s effort to cover shows in real time, and lack of awareness about Tumblr’s new specialty. “We’re hopeful we will be able to get better, more complete coverage and more first looks this year.”
To that end, Mr. Tong selected the bloggers not by how large their followings were, as he did in February, but based on what he called their “maturity” levels, and their focus on women’s wear, men’s wear, accessories or beauty. He interviewed them in person or on Skype. On Thursday, during Fashion’s Night Out, Tumblr sponsored a carnival-theme photo booth with Opening Ceremony (with photos uploaded on the store’s new blog, openingceremony.tumblr.com), and will host a cocktail party with GQ on Wednesday for a group of men’s wear bloggers.
But this month, fashion brands and marketing agencies criticized a Tumblr proposal for brands who might want to sponsor the site’s Fashion Week content. According to the proposal, Tumblr asked for $150,000 to sponsor the page for the week (and $350,000 for sponsoring Tumblr’s general fashion page, tumblr.com/tagged/fashion). It also requested upward of $10,000 for private events with the Tumblr-selected bloggers, not including the venue and other costs. Brands could also be guaranteed product placement in each of the blogs for an unlisted sum.
Marketing professionals said the cost of the ads was outrageous because Tumblr doesn’t provide the analytics to justify them.
“This is a potentially serious issue for Tumblr because the fashion community is the one community, seemingly, that Tumblr wishes to court above all others,” wrote Raman Kia, the head of digital marketing at Starworks Group, which represents luxury brands, on his blog, thesocialwarrior.com.
“Our team cares tremendously about the brands that have embraced our community in full force, and we’re incredibly excited about the early success we’ve had with our partners so far,” Katherine Barna, Tumblr’s head of communications, wrote in a statement. “They’ve been overwhelmingly supportive of the fact that these are alpha products and understand that we’re constantly overhauling and iterating in the interest of building the best products we can for our community.”
Fashion brands did start Tumblrs seemingly en masse, following the start of Oscar de la Renta’s, written by the brand’s vice president for communications, Erika Bearman, in December 2010. McQ, Kate Spade and J. Crew began using the platform, as did Thakoon and Jason Wu. “We need more European brands,” Mr. Tong said. Stefano Gabbana has one,
stefanogabbana.tumblr.com, but he posts mainly photos from his cellphone.
The fashion photographers who use it say that their Tumblrs make dedicated portfolio sites unnecessary. Based on her Tumblr, Ms. Beck was hired to shoot a cinemagraph campaign for Juicy Couture to begin in September and will be photographing a story for Tory Burch during Fashion Week. “I had no idea that people would be paying me to shoot stories on my blog,” said Ms. Beck, who started her Tumblr blog in May 2009 and has 150,000 followers. “I never had any thought of that. But it quickly became that.”
“I don’t like it when I meet people and they don’t have a Tumblr,” she added. “That’s the best business card.”
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